Sunday, 6 September 2009

The news of the day in Poland is that wykop.pl - polish site doing the same stuff as digg.com - got owned in a pretty bad way - database with user's login credentials and e-mail addresses was stolen. This post is a result of gathering info from public sites (in Polish - mostly off Dziennik Internautow which gave nice coverage) so all of it is already in public domain - otherwise I wouldn't quote any fragments or call on any information given here.

Info about breach goes public

Following what Dziennik Internautow wrote in their post, on 5 Sep 2009 a person using nickname Gimbus1xD has informed administrators of wykop.pl about the breach (no link - original post taken down) and about the fact, that some of the information stolen was already used to compromise account held with other websites, including allegro.pl (auction system like eBay). To prove his revelations, Gimbus1xD posted also screen shots of compromised Allegro account with transactions that happened two days earlier and another one with PHPMyAdmin browsing 'users' table.

The scary part here is that as Gimbus1xD wrote, about 40% of those passwords have been broken (despite being hashed) with simple dictionary and brute-force attacks because passwords were up to 7 characters long.

Allegedly the database is in the hands of vichan.net admins, which again allegedly shared 'unhashed' database with their moderators - including Gimbus1xD, who broke the news. So far it's not clear what made Gimbus1xD change his mind and make this information public.